Companies are rapidly moving to SaaS, but they often wrongly think their software vendor is responsible for data backup, and that leaves many organizations unprotected. Nathan Anderson, CTO of Jungle Disk, discusses why IT needs a backup strategy for SaaS data.
Muhammad Ali once said, “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.†In a way, software as a service (SaaS) gave IT leaders and decision-makers reason to strut in recent years. Proven savings in storage, greater IT cost efficiency, and the ability to facilitate remote work during a sudden pandemic – getting SaaSy was a good move. Unfortunately, amidst the excitement, a critical vulnerability was overlooked.Â
In the 2021 Evolution of Data Protection Cloud StrategiesOpens a new window report from ESG, more than a third (35%) of organizations depend solely on their SaaS vendor to protect their organization’s data, meaning they don’t do anything independently to back it up.
That’s a problem for many reasons, but mainly, if you don’t back it up, you can’t recover when the pressure is on. Then, regardless of how much SaaS has benefited your company, it’ll only be talk when the data you thought was backed up isn’t there or when productivity grinds to a halt because an outage is keeping users from the resources they need to get their job done.Â
You Got a Problem?
According to Veeam’s 2022 Data Protection Trends ReportOpens a new window , IT leaders estimate that downtime costs a company $1,467 per minute, the average outage lasting 78 minutes, the hourly total coming in at $88K. That’s on the low end – statistics regarding large enterprises have placed the hourly losses in the millions.Â
Outages with major SaaS providers do happen. Since October, we’ve seen a Facebook outage cripple businesses who depend on their services (especially in developing countries), an AWS outage that took down services such as Disney+ and Ring, and an Azure AD outage that shut down Microsoft 365 for an hour and a half. Not being able to access your SaaS apps is bad enough. More recently, Atlassian suffered an outageOpens a new window for some customers that started on April 4 and wasn’t fully resolved until April 18.
But when you’ve got an RFP due in two hours, and your file is in the cloud and not backed up locally, you’ve got a big problem. But why wouldn’t it be backed up, you ask?Â
Care to Back That Up?
Almost all SaaS vendors operate under what’s called a “shared responsibility†model. The vendor ensures their infrastructure is secure and the apps and associated data are available. However, they usually don’t provide long-term, granular protection of customer data. Further, vendor offerings aren’t designed to recover that email an employee deleted, a corrupted file, or a specific record.Â
Making matters worse, most SaaS apps, including Microsoft 365, permanently delete all information in the recycle bin after 30 days. Without a backup, any data in there is gone forever. As a result, companies could face serious retention policy gaps, security risks, and compliance issues. For instance, if a top executive deletes information to cover up illegal activity, an inability to produce this evidence could subject your organization to severe penalties.
If a vendor does offer backup services, but they’re unprepared to handle a disaster, your lack of backup will make fallback impossible. And if you have a disagreement with your provider and they suddenly cancel your service, you could be facing downtime and loss of revenue without access to the data.Â
Microsoft explicitly notes in its licensing agreement: “You should have a regular backup plan as Microsoft won’t be able to retrieve Your Content or Data once your account is closed.†Microsoft, like many SaaS vendors, views backup as separate from retention. And it doesn’t help that their retention policy is nearly 7,000 words long, describing at eye-glazing length their principles of retention, differences in policies for specific apps, and more.
See More: How to Pick a Good SaaS Vendor
Work the Fundamentals
The following are some fundamental tips to help you come up with an effective SaaS data backup posture that’ll enable your company to keep moving ahead despite the challenges.Â
- Understand Responsibilities: Review your provider’s shared responsibility model. For those using Microsoft 365, Veeam offers a comprehensive overviewOpens a new window of who is responsible for what. Â
- Review and Prioritize Data: Ensure high priority and mission-critical data is secure and compliant. In particular, be on the lookout for financial, personally identifiable (PII), and protected health (PHI) information.Â
- Legal Considerations: When reviewing your data, consider emails that should be saved for legal purposes a priority as well. When critical information is missing, questions arise.Â
- Find a Solution: Once you understand what’s needed for SaaS backup, find a solution that best protects your data, but also makes sure it is easy to use. Many find the best approach is to use another SaaS offering because these providers are versed in the area, know best practices, and how to recover quickly.
Regarding the latter, some of these solutions are designed with specific SaaS offerings in mind such as Microsoft 365. Look for those that allow secure access to backups via multi-factor authentication and the ability to fine-tune retention policies and recover granularly. Some of the solutions can even work in hybrid situations and move data between on-premises solutions and SaaS, which can be a bottleneck for some.Â
Back It Up
When you’re discussing SaaS with IT teams or decision-makers, make sure they understand these services require the same attention as your in-house, on-premise solutions. Explain that the attributes that made SaaS so easy to champion are all there — but they can be just as easily lost if the data they hold is not backed up and protected.
Remember, getting SaaSy is fine, but only if you’re ready to back it up.
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